“Schools account for an average of less than 20 percent of a child’s waking hours … .”

This quote from Paul Reville, former chair of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and the current Director of the Redesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, represents an important moment of reckoning – there is no margin of error in our educational system.

With only 20 percent of a student’s school-age years allocated to educators, a school’s response to student need the moment it presents must be rapid, high quality and consistent –the characteristics that distinguish a high performing school from a school on fire.

We recently spent time at The High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology (Tele), a high performing school in our network of schools. We have documented what we learned in our recent report, Design and Data In Balance. Tele is a school that has created a culture that Karl Weick calls “collective mindfulness” (and what we call “constant awareness”). Tele creates collective mindfulness in two ways: 1) by strategically positioning educators so that they see a student from multiple vantage points and 2) by establishing structures where student information is shared daily. Collective mindfulness not only generates greater perspective into the students’ strengths and weaknesses - but how those strengths and weaknesses play out in different classroom, school and home contexts. The constant flow of communication among the educators turns a one dimensional snapshot of a student into a continuous series of insights that brings a student fully into focus. It’s like going from a Byzantinian rendering of a student frozen in time to an experience that is more akin to an IMAX movie.

Collective mindfulness sets up the conditions for response. With a more complete understanding of their students, educators can imagine and re-imagine interventions that are just as nimble as their students.

To create a culture of collective mindfulness Tele cultivates a workforce with more than just a strong instructional muscle. Tele’s workforce has sophisticated communication, collaboration, problem solving, reasoning, data, research, time management, and technology skills. These are the same skills Achieve identifies in their article, Understanding the Skills in the Common Core State Standards and the skills employers identify as critical for survival in a rapidly evolving workforce. In other words, Tele is doing more than teaching the common core to students. This is a school that embodies the spirit of the thing.

It stands to reason then, that high performing schools are best positioned to develop these same adaptive and critical thinking skills in their students. The reality, however, is that too many educators who are charged with the development of these skills are working in school environments that struggle to adapt and are out of step with the evolving workforce around them. This unmistakable irony reinforces the simple fact that strong instructional skills, while necessary, are not enough and suggests that our mental models of “school” must evolve.

At New Visions, we are taking steps to support this evolution. An emerging body of work is the creation of lightweight and flexible tools along with a comprehensive high school strategy for how to use them. Mark Dunetz has written an excellent blog post that describes this work and it is well worth the read. New Visions also has a new suite of data tools rolling out under the leadership of Brad Gunton. The Student Sorter is our flagship data tool. As we enter into a new era of community schools here in NYC, Ron Chaluisan and his team are weakening the membrane between community and school. Of course, we continue to support educator effectiveness as we expand our Urban Teacher Residency program and innovate on curriculum.